Who's online

I'm basically done with my first batch of interviews. I'm just waiting the last two replies from two interviewees and then I need to do some sorting of the mateiral, but a part from that, I say that I'm quite satisfied!

I had six interviews. Two people are mostly gamers and 'minor' contrinutors within the Italian Wesnoth community. The other four interviewees are regular contributors (one was regular and got now retired) within the international/official scope of Wesnoth. Interviews were carried in a fragmented and heterogenous way: three of them over e-mail, two over IRC, and one face-to-face!

This has been an exciting experience because it allows you to interact in different ways with the people who are connected with Wesnoth, and this is interesting both from the perspective of research methodology but also at the personal level. The different ways of conducting the interviews also force you to re-think and tailor your questions (and basically, what you want to know form them) accordingly to the kind of interaction with the interviewee.

Currently, I'm working on recruiting interviewees. Initially, I was thinking to interview first people as developers of BfW and later on, people as users. However, I realised this was a bad choice at two levels. A practical one: the whole process of interviewing one group at a time could result in delays (e.g. If I have to wait 2 months before I complete developers interviewing without even beginning to make questions to users I can end up having some problems when unexpected delays happen.). At a theorical level: it is somewhat artifical to distinguish informants' categories between "developers" and "users". They are both at the same time.

Anyway, I currently sent reruitment calls in the international community (-dev mailing list, #wesnoth-dev) and in the italian community forum, and I'm really satisfied by the answers provided by the people. They showed supportive about my research and provided some useful clarifications. For instance, I overlooked the fact that artist developers are far more present within the international forum than they are in the mailing lists and IRC.

I definitely need more people to interview, but I'm sure that with the few ones who already offered their help, I can let emerge some good hints about development/use mediation in Wesnoth.

The last entry of this blog is quite old. However, I'm not dead neither I stopped my PhD project :) So, here I just provide a quick update.

Since the end of december, until beginning of march I mainly worked on producing a Reasoned Bibliography (which I also uploaded here). This kind of document is not equal to the so-called commented bibliographies. These ones are bullet lists of references each of which is provided with a brief comment attempting to put it in to context and in relation to a given topic/research. Within my doctoral school, the reasoned bibliography is framed as an attempt to locate the relevant academic debates for the research and to present them in a discursive manner. An early attempt at building up the theoretical chapter.

However, as I wrote here, I'm about to start developing a little scenario (for multi-player), and for this I decided to work on the development version of BfW. It took me a little bit to compile BfW 1.9.2 and to install and configure the Wesnoth-UMC IDE, so yesterday when I saw the announcement of the new dev release I was surprirsed. Morever, I was undecided about what to do.

Finally, I decided to upgrade my testing/development environment to the 1.9.3, bascially because I really did not have the time to start writing anything for my scenario. So instead of starting on a version that is already old, I preferred to take the time to upgrade it. This means doing the whole compiling & installation process again.

This time, it took me much less. However, due to some misconfiguration of folder names I think I hit some conflicts between 1.9.2 and 1.9.3 versions on my laptop. So I had to remove both versions and re-install again the 1.9.3

During the past week, the Wesnoth-UMC-Dev project updated its working platform with renewed style and improved functionalities. Moreover, they added a nice feed which will keep interested people informed about what is going on in the project.

Since I'm interested in understanding better how this project works and since I will also attempt producing my small UMC for Battle for Wesnoth, I decided to integrate their ffed into this website. That's why as of yesterday, you can see an additional block on the bottom right area.

I'm also considering to add, in future, more feeds that related to BfW, if I find relevant ones!